Issue Responsiveness in the European Union. Issue Salience in Public Opinion and the European Parliament

I analyse to what extent the European Parliament as the EU’s only directly elected institution is responsive to the issues that EU citizens identify as most important. Through an exploratory analysis of bivariate OLS regressions, correlations are investigated between issue salience in public opinion in the 28 EU Member States (taken from the Standard Eurobarometer) and different time lags and leads of issue salience in EP plenary debates since 2010. Data on issue salience in the EP is gathered through topic modelling. For the three issues that figured most prominently in the Eurobarometer (Economic Situation, Terrorism and Immigration), there are significant correspondences between issue salience in public opinion and in EP plenary debates, but the direction of responsiveness seems to depend on the issues and on whether they are part of the EU’s principal mandate. Although the bivariate correlations do not allow for causal inference, taking exogenous events into account, the data suggest that, rather than being directly responsive to the European Parliament or the EU, the public responds primarily to momentous world events covered by the media (such as the Eurozone crisis, the increase in terrorist attacks in Europe, and the European refugee crisis). Until the ECPR General Conference in August I will include more recent data (so far, my analysis covers the years 2010-2017) and further examine exogenous factors, without which no causal conclusions can be drawn on the responsiveness of the EP to public opinion.